Matched Betting Strategy Basics

If you’re a regular here on the site or subscribe to my emails you’ll know I always talk a lot about efficiency.

The fact of the matter is it’s super easy to get stuck in a rut matched betting if you are not productive.

I’m sure most of us have been there. You’ve searched low and hard for offers and you’ve done your research on how to make the most out of it… Then you go off scouring for bookie odds and watching for lay odds to change in your favour. Time passes. The day’s near enough over and you’ve earned £3.27. You’re left thinking – why am I doing this!? Haha.

The thing is… Matched betting is a volume game.

By this I mean that the more matched bets you place, the bigger your end of month bankroll.

People making great money matched betting are not just doing 4-5 bets per month. They’re doing 4-5 per day! At least!

But we don’t all have time to sit, research, search for bets and make that happen. And this is why I’m a big advocate of tools to make it easier.

Matched Betting Tools Make Sense!

Now to me, the undisputed best tool for making money from matched betting is Profit Maximiser.

It doesn’t end with matched betting of course. In here, all kind of advantage gambling is up for discussion. Any offer – betting, bingo, casino or whatever – is fair game. So long as the calculated expected value is a positive figure.

I mean it when I say there is no better resource for knowing what to do and when to do it when it comes to advantage play.

But I’m not here today to write about that community. You can read up more for that elsewhere on the site.

Today I wanted to talk about the matched betting automatcher that makes life 100 times easier.

Matched Betting Software – What Does it Actually Do?

In a nutshell: it saves you an absolute ton of time. And as we earlier discussed… Time means money.

The matched betting automatcher software crawls bookmaker and betting exchange websites to compare odds. These crawls are happening every few seconds.

The effect of this is you get a complete overview of all good matched bets available at any given moment.

Now this is useful for two reasons:

Finding Arbs or Near Arbs (narbs)

I think if you’re reading this you’ll be familiar with arbitrage betting strategy already.

When using the software to hunt for arbs its easy to spot high return opportunities at the blink of an eye. This is important because arbs tend to disappear quick as bookies adjust their lines.

Having arbitrage betting software like this will always trump finding these bets for yourself.

Unless you live out of the UK though I’ve never suggested arbing as a recommended strategy. The reason for this is it’s a sure fire way to get your account noticed and limited.

My preference has and always will be utilising bonus offers with near arbs, or narbs as I’ll refer to them from now on.

Finding Matched Bets for Bonus Offers

The software is great for ploughing through sign-up, daily reload or conditional bonuses.

The automatcher is completely filterable to your requirements.

For instance: let’s say we have a £50 offer at RaceBets which requires us to bet at odds of 2.0 or greater. Let’s also suppose we only have a balance at Smarkets rather than Betfair.

Using the filters we can set all this up so we only see relevant bets like shown here:

Boom! In a few seconds we’ve found a 12/11 arb with £60 available to lay.

If we navigate over to RaceBets we can see this live and ready to go:

Clicking on the Smarkets icon within the software links us direct to the betting market:

… and it becomes clear to see how quick you can smash through matched betting offers.

Now a little word of warning since I’ve talked about my preference for narbs rather than arbs.

The fact of the matter is that narbs yield less obvious betting patterns. Thus you are less likely to get accounts restricted.

Yes… You might lose out on a few quid here or there by not taking the best odds available. But! This is far balanced out by the long-term thinking of keeping accounts alive.

To look at this betting example again for sake of this thinking, my eyes were more drawn to this set of matching odds:

The match is decent but not great. Enough to make a sizeable chunk of money from a £50 free bet whilst flying under the radar.

I know. I know. Arbs can be tempting! I’ve learned the hard way. Haha.

But what’s cool about this software is you can actually HIDE the arbs from sight if you can’t trust yourself!

Again looking at that same filter panel we looked at earlier you can see the check box here:

I’ve also highlighted in the above screenshot the fact that results are time filterable.

If you’ve ever placed a bet only to find the event doesn’t start for 4-5 days then you’ll know how useful this is. Nobody likes tying up their exchange liabilities for that long. If I’m betting on racing I generally want it done within the next few hours.

Bonus Bagging Calculator

Further speeding up the bet matching process is the included bonus bagging calculator.

You can access this by clicking the little calculator icon in the Info column of the matcher.

When you pull up the calculator for your bet it gives you all the usual back and lay calculator options:

You can choose whether it’s a qualifier, stake not returned or stake returned free bet. You can edit the stake, odds, commissions and play with lay odds as you want to.

It’s definitely useful to have the in-built calculator bundled with the matched betting software. I do find myself using it quite often.

What I tend to do is make quick use of this calculator to check on estimated returns. Then when I’m happy I place the bets then repeat what I just did in my spreadsheet with all the relevant details. The spreadsheet then acts as my diary on what I’ve done each day to refer to.

Dutching Software

Some people like to go dutch… And dutching through big bet baskets to avoid paying exchange commissions all the time is a good idea.

Great for us is that this matched betting tool also contains a dutching software bolt on.

If you’re unfamiliar with what dutching is then check the arbitrage explained post here for more info. It’s a method of using bookie back bets against each other to lock in profit.

The dutching software is like the matched betting software. But the lay out is obvious a little bit different:

Again you are able to use filters to control what bets you want to see available. There are a couple of handy drop down menus on the main panel also for navigating quick to specific bookies.

Like the bonus bagging calculator add-on, a similar version is available for dutch bets:

One cool little feature is the ‘Round’ button.

If you are doing dutches you’re going to want to use this. If you’re betting at bookies with unlevel stakes then that’s going to flag alarm bells off. Try and blend in a bit! ;)

In Play Back and Lay Matching

From time to time you might come across an offer that requires you to bet in-play.

I also know a great number of people who like to match their bets in-play anyway. This is because the bookies tend to fall out of line with the exchanges easier.

The problem with in-play betting is that odds move fast.

To account for this: within the matched betting software there is a special tab for in-play bets.

When a match is on, the odds will refresh every 10 seconds to ensure you never miss a tick of an odds movement.

Using the filters you can also calibrate the odds matching to your requirements. This screen has a special audible alarm when a new matched bet pops up which meets what you’ve specified.

This is pretty useful. You can leave the window open in the background whilst you can get on with other things.

Channel 4 Racing Offers Software

Another highlight feature of this matched betting software is this dedicated section.

Channel 4 Racing Offers have for years been some of the best existing customer reloads out there.

Actually – there are two or three similar type of offers that fall under this criteria. Since they are daily reloads these products have got their own area.

You don’t need to set up any special filters (unless you want to). You can just click into here and immediately get snacking on whatever odds are available.